In a recent article in "Challenge" magazine, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue that the central message of F. A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" is that any attempt to create a welfare state must lead inevitably to totalitarianism. I argue in my paper that this was not the central argument;...

The rhetoric of positivism had a profound effect on the worldview and practice of economists in the middle of the last century. Though this influence has greatly diminished, it still may be found in the attitude of many economists towards the history of their discipline. This paper traces the...

The paper challenges Joseph Salerno’s recent revisionist account in “The Place of Human Action in the Development of Economic Thought” of the relationship between Friedrich von Wieser and F.A. Hayek and of their views on equilibrium theory. The paper argues, contra Salerno, that Wieser was...

The rhetoric of positivism had a profound effect on the worldview and practice of economists in the middle of the last century. Though this influence has greatly diminished, it still may be found in the attitude of many economists towards the history of their discipline. This paper traces the...

In a recent article in "Challenge" magazine, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue that the central message of F. A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" is that any attempt to create a welfare state must lead inevitably to totalitarianism. I argue in my paper that this was not the central argument;...

The rhetoric of positivism had a profound effect on the worldview and practice of economists in the middle of the last century. Though this influence has greatly diminished, it still may be found in the attitude of many economists towards the history of their discipline. This paper traces the...